
“Why do they hate us so much?” a boy growing up Evangelical once asked his father.
(True or not, this is a common belief among Evangelical Christians.)
“Because so many Christians are such jerks,” his father told him.
There are forms of Christianity that I, as a pagan, respect, even admire.
With its intellectual vacuity, utter lack of social conscience, and political triumphalism, Evangelicalism is decidedly not one of them.
Like many gender-non-conforming kids, I grew up socially isolated.
Elementary school wasn't so bad. Having grown up with me, the other kids mostly just accepted me for who I was. Junior high, though, was hellish. There I was the weird kid, the outsider. (There must be easier ways to learn self-reliance.) In high school I finally made some friends among the other egghead creatives. I loved my new friends all the better for understanding the worth of what I'd worked so hard to gain.
Then I lost most of those friends again to the so-called “Jesus Revolution.”
By then, my pagan identity was already fully formed. I could see their so-called “revolution” for what it actually was: a total abrogation of intelligence, an unthinking embrace of the worst kind of reactionary conservatism.
(I was right. My former friends and their co-religionists were precisely the demographic that betrayed us to Reagan and his successors, including Trump.)
Suddenly, the witch-boy was the pariah again. Finally, I decided to end it.